The Cloud Foundry project celebrated its first birthday Wednesday and its parent, VMware, brought something special to the party: a big slice of open source software.
It's called Bosh and it's the software that VMware engineers are already using to roll changes through their own platform-as-a-service product: Cloudfoundry.com.
In tech jargon this kind of widescale server configuration and management stuff is known as DevOps, and VMware thinks its open source tool could be used by anyone who wants to set up and run a platform cloud -- essentially a spot on the cloud where developers can run their applications without having to worry about the underlying storage and servers. "It's a very cool piece of DevOps code and I think it will be very popular beyond Cloud Foundry," says VMware chief technology officer Stephen Herrod.
VMware is vying for the hearts of developers with Cloud Foundry, which is an open source competitor to the likes of Microsoft Azure and Google's App Engine. The company says it's had more people sign up for Cloud Foundry than it expected on launch date a year ago, but Herrod wouldn't say exactly how many: "Many tens of thousands" was the best estimate he'd give.
To get developers, VMware is taking the open source route. It often refers to Cloud Foundry as the Linux of the future -- a single target for software makers that runs on many different kinds of hardware and virtual machines.
That's a bit of a change for VMware, which is best known for selling proprietary software that lets data centers free up servers by squishing programs into virtual machines.
Before Cloud Foundry, VMware wasn't really a big open source player, but the project has done well in its first year, says James Governor, an analyst with the firm RedMonk. But developers are still waiting to see how the company will handle any major forks in its platform, should they occur. "The key challenge that they have will be community management," he says.
